Proletarians or owners

"There is only one excuse for ingratitude, but it is a good one: the humiliation felt from having been forced to accept help" (Louis Dumur)

My previous article started from the idea that what makes the housing problem most intractable is that there is an attempt to decouple it from its main cause, which is none other than immigration. The integration of immigration, on the other hand, is the main long-term problem we face, and it is intimately linked to the solution we provide for their access to housing.

Simplified, we have two models: that they become owners or that they remain as tenants, preferably of social housing.

Francoist Spain chose the first model, so the protagonists of the great migratory wave between 1950 and 1975 ended up buying a home. They bought it because they wanted to and because they could: if one dives into La Vanguardia from the early 1970s –when that newspaper was the Idealista and Infojobs of the era– one will be able to find thousands of housing and job offers. The figures are in pesetas, which, when referring to housing, seem to have turned into euros (a home in St. Boi for 435,000 ptas., one on República Argentina for 775,000...), while when referring to salaries they seem to have turned into 25 euro cents (a workshop manager “technical engineer level” for 300,000 ptas. the first year, an administrative clerk for 210-252,000 ptas...).

The fact is that that immigration became the owner of its housing. In contrast, in France the rental model has been chosen, and particularly that of social housing. Of the 6 million French people living in the "priority neighborhoods" (the banlieues, to understand us), 84% live in rentals, 90% of whom (that is, 75% of the total) in the form of social housing, that is, below market price. Only 17% of French people of African origin are homeowners, and almost half live in social housing.

As with almost everything, these solutions are the result of political decisions. Francoism was an authoritarian system that valued, above all else, stability, and knew that a property owner is a conservative person. That is why it did everything it could –which was a lot– so that Spaniards would become owners of their housing. Conversely, the French model is the product of a liberal political ideology –which has been shared by both the right and the left– that consists of allowing wages to be low and compensating the disadvantaged through public aid. During the late Franco period, wages were high and aid was scarce, whereas in present-day France, wages may be low but the aid is very generous.

Problems are seen more clearly from a distance, and it is easy to realize that the French are trying to solve problems of dignity through financial aid. That the children of North African immigration reject France, its symbols, and its republican values is an evidence; that Islam has something to do with it is also evident, just as it is clear that the humiliation of being second-class citizens also has something to do with it. What is not clear is to what extent Islam, which is refractory to republican ideals, triumphs in the second and third generations of Africans due to their feeling of humiliation, but common sense suggests that the relationship is surely high.

Because what is often forgotten in the political debate is that people do not want to be helped in order to make ends meet. They want to earn it, and aid does not evoke gratitude, but resentment.

Obviously, these reasonings seem timely to us, because we have received 2 million immigrants, because many of them earn too little to afford housing at market price and because we are thinking that the best way to solve this problem is to build social rental housing. It should be evident that this is the recipe for a social fracture of colossal dimensions that our children do not deserve.

It is necessary to build a lot, but it must be understood that salaries must be such that they allow access to housing under market conditions. When the Franco regime introduced the interprofessional minimum wage in 1963, a journalist asked the Minister of Labour what would happen to the businessmen who could not afford it, and the minister replied that "Spain is not interested in those companies." It is exactly that: we are not interested in jobs that do not pay a salary that allows for paying for housing under market conditions. We are not interested in them at all.

That a significant part of the Catalan left is convinced that it is necessary to create a huge social rental stock, if possible publicly owned? It is part of their bewilderment, which is not small.